Huck, Tom, Max & Cesar
Human: Adam and May B. of TriPekes & The Joker
Huck: My wife and I decided we wanted to share our life with a dog. After looking at pictures of dogs at a local rescue we picked our Huckleberry. He was a little boy who spent the first 2 plus years of his life at a puppy mill/rescue. On adoption day Huck was running around. Not because he was excited. He was scared of everything, all he wanted to do is hide. When you get a dog you have thoughts on how it is going to be ... friendly, playing fetch, chewing on everything, etc. Huck was none of those things. I'm not sure Huck knew how to be a dog. The people at the rescue even brought another Pekingese they had because Huck was so skittish they thought we might not take him. They were wrong. We knew at first sight that we were meant to love him. We liked his name so much that we kept the name that the Homeward Bound Animal Welfare Group gave him.
Tom: We'd had Huck for about 2 weeks when the rescue called us and asked if we could foster a Pekingese that needed antibiotic ointment applied to one of his eyes twice daily. We agreed. Tom was a 2 year old from Kentucky. You could tell right away he had been someone's pet before. Well socialized, playful and mischievous. In many ways the polar opposite of Huck. What amazed us was that Tom was actually teaching Huck what it meant to be a dog. We gave Tom his name because of Huck (aka Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer). Tom was our first "foster fail."
Max: A few months later the rescue contacted us again. They only had one of the large batch of Pekingese obtained from a puppy mill in Minnesota, the same place as Huck. Wow! Max was gorgeous! Of course, the rescue owner wanted us to foster him until he was adopted. Max was sweet and gentle. Not scared of everything like Huck but preferred solitude. It was another 3 weeks before we actually took him in because I was heading out of town for work. Max is small by normal Pekingese standards. When trying to come up name the wife suggested the opposite of what he was, not tiny but Max. Max was also the name of my beloved boyhood dog and they shared a similar color scheme. All 3 boys are within 6 months of the same age. We knew we had another foster fail on our hands. Hence, the TriPekes were born. We thought it to be a cute twist on the solitare game called TriPeaks.
Cesar: With 3 Pekingese boys, we dove head first into the Pekingese community. What wonderful people. We would occasionally see a picture of an albino Pekingese and were just mesmerized. We told ourselves if one were ever to become available we would consider expanding our crew. After a 1.5 years of off-and-on searching on Petfinder we located Cesar in South Carolina. At 16 months old he was half the age of the TriPekes. Tom and I took the 750 mile drive to meet Cesar. They both got along well enough so I brought him home. That was 1 very long day. We struggled coming up with a name. Given his appearance we considered Casper, Cotton, and the word White and Snow in other languages. None of them worked. Since we had a card theme nickname going for our 3 Pekes we tried Joker. We loved that concept but actually calling him Joker turned about to be cumbersome/clumsy. My wife came up with the idea of naming him after one of the actors that played The Joker from Batman. We chose to name him Cesar after Cesar Romero who played The Joker from the 1960s Batman TV series.
